In an email to XNA/DirectX Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) yesterday, Microsoft gave notice that MVP status was being phased out for program members. According to the missive, this is being done because “the XNA Game Studio is not in active development and DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.”

XNA was Microsoft’s toolset for cross-platform game development between the Xbox 360, Zune (when applicable), Windows Phone 7, and PC titles. It debuted in 2004 and was used by a number of small developers/indie titles that were later made available on Xbox Live. As Promit Roy, CTO of Action Labs, points out, this is scarcely a surprise. XNA has lagged behind developments on the PC side for years and wasn’t capable of targeting DirectX 10 or 11 feature sets despite the former being over six years old.

The comment on DirectX is more startling, and in Roy’s view, poorly worded. Tech enthusiasts tend to treat “DirectX” as synonymous with “Direct3D,” but they aren’t the same thing. Direct3D continues to change and adapt, but it’s been effectively folded into Windows 8. As Roy notes “Direct3D has been absorbed into Windows core, and thus is no more a ‘technology’ than GDI or Winsock.”

Toolset deprecation and API shifts aren’t normally big news if you aren’t a programmer, but there are other factors in play. Microsoft is expected to launch the Xbox 360’s successor between the end of 2013 and early 2014. XNA was a useful component of Xbox 360 development (it was announced in 2004, 18 months before the Xbox 360 shipped). So what’s supposed to take its place? Microsoft doesn’t currently have an answer. Last year, MS made waves when it announced that Metro Windows 8 User Experience applications (does anyone actually call it that, ever?) would depend on HTML, JavaScript, and XAML.

Reorganizing this image in a way that makes it more accurate has nearly become a pastime.

In reality the situation is far more complex, but that diagram launched a lot of questions about the future of Windows development and just how much of a headache developers would face if they wanted to move the Desktop side of the equation over to Metro-style applications.

Then Microsoft decided Visual Studio Express 2012 wouldn’t support anything but Metro-style applications. If you wanted to compile applications for Desktop, you had to pay for the Professional Edition. The company reversed this stance after major consumer outcry, but it was another misstep from a corporation that lauded itself on putting developers first.

It’s not particularly surprising that Microsoft killed XNA, given how the company has treated it in recent years. What’s unusual — or, at least, what would’ve been unusual once upon a time — is that there’s no clearly articulated follow-up. There’s no information on what developers should expect in the future, if anything. Given that XNA was apparently successful at simplifying and promoting cross-platform development, that’s a bit odd.

Are there alternatives? Absolutely. But Microsoft’s developer support was a key factor in the Xbox 360’s early success over the PS3. There are other options for game development besides XNA, but there’s no data on what current XNA devs should plan to do if they want to develop games for the Xbox 720/Durango. Even if D3D is still in development, calling DirectX moribund isn’t exactly positive. It’s not like D3D itself couldn’t stand some major improvement; the API’s overhead in the PC space is a huge part of why consoles are able to effectively keep pace with PCs years after their internal hardware is thoroughly outdated.

Microsoft blames AMD and Nvidia for some of this. AMD and NV blame Microsoft. End users are stuck with bottlenecks and communication on resolving said issues has dwindled to nothing. At this point, it seems as though even Microsoft has no real idea how XNA users and cross-platform developers should think about the future of game development in Windows beyond “Let’s roll it all into one package.” It’s ludicrous to think the company would jeopardize its programming advantages ahead of its next-generation console launch, but absent better communication, that’s the way things look.

Updated:Microsoft has emailed Promit Roy to say that the first email was in error, and that “DirectX is evolving and will continue to evolve.” Like Roy, though, we’re still musing as to why it took a leaked email for Microsoft to clarify its stance on DX and XNA.

Tagged In

Microsoft trying to kill PC gaming, this could well be very good news for opengl and the “steambox”

Robert

Yeah, it’s like MS is just daring the game industry to fully adopt Linex.

Dustymack

No more Call of Duty and Crysis! It will just be an angry bird knock off from the MS “app” store. Ballmer must be fired! He has single handily destroyed the desktop market. Get ready for win-blows 9……

BobDole

If you think CoD and Crysis are the good parts of the games industry that would be missing you really have no business complaining.

JasonEnzoD

My thoughts also. It’s the smaller, less commercial games, that will suffer.

http://profiles.google.com/fedekiller Federico Ramírez

Killing PC gaming on windows would just be them throwing the main reason why people don’t just use Linux, If I could play League of Legends and most random games on Linux I’d just use Ubuntu. Now with Steam on linux, and the disconfort which is using windows 8, I’m considering making the switch more than ever.

JasonEnzoD

It started with Microsoft Flight Simulator which was axed then re-released online where they tried to sell it piecemeal. Total failure. As was Games for Windows Live.
They aren’t trying to kill PC gaming, they are trying to kill the Windows desktop, Windows desktop applications (including games) and the desktop API, so they can force Windows users over to the Metro Interface. Not in Windows 8, but soon. Windows 9 may be. And of course they want Steam out, because they compete directly with Microsoft’s new, long term strategic plan.
Once Windows have their closed and governed operating system, they stand to make big money on all third party developers.

JasonEnzoD

It started with Microsoft Flight Simulator which was axed then re-released online where they tried to sell it piecemeal. Total failure. As was Games for Windows Live.
They aren’t trying to kill PC gaming, they are trying to kill the Windows desktop, Windows desktop applications (including games) and the desktop API, so they can force Windows users over to the Metro Interface. Not in Windows 8, but soon. Windows 9 may be. And of course they want Steam out, because they compete directly with Microsoft’s new, long term strategic plan.
Once Windows have their closed and governed operating system, they stand to make big money on all third party developers.

XNA is being killed in favor of WinRT which is already supported in Windows 8, Windows Phone, and reportedly, the next gen Xbox.

Neutrino .

But there’s no WinRt on XP, Vista, Win7 or XBox 360 is there? Who would write a Windows game that wouldn’t run on those platforms?

jaytmoon

And there goes the retail price of the games skyrocketing again!

Joel Hruska

I’ve read it. It’s true that MS walked back some of the poorly worded implications of the original piece, but the more worrisome problem is the lack of communication on future development as well as the cancellation of XNA.

D3D is going nowhere. The future of DirectX and cross-platform development remain uncertain.

JasonEnzoD

While OpenGL gets more and more object-orienated-like with every release…

JasonEnzoD

While OpenGL gets more and more object-orienated-like with every release…

http://twitter.com/NHowell14 Nicoli

bahahahaha. This falls perfectly inline with the rumors of the closed off PC platform that MS is rumored to introduce with the new xbox. An exact Apple clone with Windows 8 having the Xbox name stretch across several products.

HEY MICROSOFT, HOW BOUT YOU COME UP WITH SOMETHING ORIGINAL AND maybe PEOPLE WILL FORGET HOW UTTERLY PISS POOR ALL YOUR OTHER PRODUCTS HAVE BEEN!!!!

oag92y3942

how about you stop advising microsoft
its like you’re supporting them

http://www.facebook.com/terrence.a.davis1 Terrence Andrew Davis

I’m sick of programming. Everything is shit.

JasonEnzoD

I am too.

JasonEnzoD

I am too.

PhilipNicolcev

Programming has never been easier.

Cameron Cole

Microsoft isn’t very legacy developer friendly. They create, deprecate and kill off platforms at a staggering rate often with no upgrade path sans a rewrite. It has worked for a long time because they are/were an easy sell as a vendor in businesses, but that is changing as the world moves away from Windows. Nothing will help MS if they continue to snub their devs time and time again as we are their biggest strength.

http://www.facebook.com/khimera2000 Jonathan Freeman

All company’s do this. Even apple, let’s not pretend that they where always X86, and there is some speculation that they want to move to ARM. MS does support alot of there older operating systems though which is useful.

Generalkidd

Not legacy developer friendly? Microsoft has always been about legacy support which some people claimed was not a good thing because it slowed down progress of Windows. Even Windows 8 today still supports 16-bit applications from the MS-DOS and pre-Windows 95 era. Windows Phone 8 also still supports legacy Windows Phone 7 applications including XNA games and historically the Xbox 360 did pretty well with original xbox backwards compatibility. Don’t forget, Microsoft still has to cater to its primary customer base which is actually the enterprise market. Everyone knows corporations don’t like drastic changes/upgrades to their software so Microsoft does everything it can to make sure legacy applications run on newer versions of their software.

Cameron

Just don’t tell that to dead or dying projects like VFP, VB, Silverlight, JPlus, Interdev, WPF, DAO, DDE, RDO, MTS, OLE, LINQ, ASP.net… even .Net and XAML are showing signs of being replaced with pure HTML5/JS.

” It’s not like D3D itself
couldn’t stand some major improvement; the API’s overhead in the PC
space is a huge part of why consoles are able to effectively keep pace
with PCs years after their internal hardware is thoroughly outdated.”

This is wrong and you know it. Console games benefit from being a fixed platform set that can be coded for in ways that the mercurial hardware of the PC can’t. You know exactly what the hardware will be and can tweak for that. Halo 4, a game they likely plan to never port to PC, is a perfect example of this.

On PC, you work within API standards, and can build up a high-end settings mode that absolutely disgraces console graphics capabilities because you know you have users out there with GPUs that can render across three 2560×1600 monitors. I run a last-gen mid-tier GPU (Geforce 560 Ti) and it looks better than what my 360 could ever put out.

No, I don’t. I write what I believe to be true, based on the research I conduct. If you’d like to have a discussion on a point where you believe me to be in error, I’m 100% open to that. But you *really* shouldn’t assume that I’m disseminating inaccurate information by default for nefarious purposes.

In this specific case, I found draw call distance called out as a primary difference between the Xbox / PS3 and PC platforms in multiple discussions and articles with input from multiple developers who have worked on very different projects.

Draw calls are a CPU problem, not a GPU problem — but the overhead DX requires chokes the CPU much more quickly than the Xbox 360 and PS3. As you say, your graphics levels for a PC are still much better than on those platforms.

These things can *both* be true. PC video cards have shading and texturing capabilities that leave consoles in the dirt. That doesn’t mean the draw call bottleneck is nonexistent.

And in the console environment you have explicitly fixed hardware. PC APIs and Devs have to work with generic specs that will work on a very broad spectrum of capability and chipsets. On console you can hard-code lower spec hardware to act a certain way and eke out more performance. But trying to say consoles have kept pace with PC isn’t accurate. We’re just coming out of a dark period where most big PC titles were crappy ports of the CONSOLE version, which made the difference seem smaller.

Joel Hruska

And what do you think happens when the next-gen of DX11 consoles launches? :P

We go right back to that. Overall game graphics will lift both PC and console (which is great), but several devs have said they favored working harder on PC graphics over the past few years *precisely* because it made it easier to get ready for the next generation of console hardware.

chojin999

More insane Microsoft messed up nonsense.

So they want to throw away Win32 windows APIs and the desktop because they want all Metro/ModernUI full-screen single-window apps.

And now they want to get rid of DirectX too ? WHAT ?

They are out of mind, clearly.

http://www.facebook.com/ian.skinner.9 Ian Skinner

Considering MS stalled all dev. work on DX to keep the 360 relevant? DX was pretty much dead 8 years ago.

Seriously, think about that for a minute. Yes, Microsoft planned for the Xbox 360 to have a 7-8 year run. But do you really think the company just threw up its hands and said “Well, now we quit doing 3D graphics for six years. Let’s just fire all those people, kill those teams, and then put them back together haphazardly when its time to start working on the next-gen console.”

There are a lot of questions about how D3D is supported, what the future of DirectX looks like, and how MS communicates its decisions with developers. But the idea that DirectX pretty much stopped evolving after 9.0 is absolutely untrue.

Robert Foy

No, his response is true. How many DX10/11 games have actually been made?

Now compare those numbers to how many DX9 games have been made to play on subpar outdated equipment, which is STILL being utilized. AKA, hardly anyone is making DX10 games, let alone DX11 games. DX9 games are STILL getting made more than the later versions.

That’s sad, and the reason for it is everyone wants to make games to run on xbox to reach the lowest common denominator to make the most money.

MS has stymied PC gaming for a long time, and that was by design. The quicker developers move to OpengGL the better for PC gaming, not to mention all of the OTHER platforms that use it…aka everyone else but MS.

Joel Hruska

Robert,

1) No one is making “DX10” games anymore. DX11 allows developers to target feature sets. You can create a DX11 game that falls back seamlessly to DX10, which is why a lot of games only advertise DX11/DX9 rendering modes. In some cases, it’s faster to run DX9 as a subset of DX11 than to use the DX9 rendering natively.

2) Game developers target the Xbox 360 and PS3 because those platforms account for the majority of consoles. This isn’t Microsoft’s “fault.” There’s no way to magically make the Xbox 360 or PS3 DX10/11 compatible. The GPU in the Xbox 360 is related to the Radeon R600 (which *was* DX10 compatible), but it’s not the same chip.

3) If you read the source piece for this article, he repeatedly states that as bad as the DX situation is, OpenGL is not a realistic alternative. I’m certain that for some, OGL *is* a better choice — but clearly there are other considerations that limit its appeal.

Before you claim that MS has deliberately hurt PC gaming, please consider the following (written by myself). The graph is what’s important:

It was only this past January that Microsoft’s total recognized revenue from its entertainment division broke into the black. If we go back to the development cycle for the original Xbox, the company is still $2 billion in the red.

I can see why you might claim that Microsoft kept the Xbox 360 around longer than it should’ve, to milk the product, but that claim needs to be taken in context. If Microsoft had released a new console in, say, 2011, the Xbox 360 would never have been profitable.

Those figures include MS revenue from software sales.

http://twitter.com/hinakachan1 hinakachan

microsoft need open eyes w8 and some new “ideas” are a shit or bye bye ms emperor

stephan938

If you think Charlotte`s story is something…, one week ago my sisters friend who is a single mom basically recieved a check for $5029 sitting there fourteen hours a week from there house and they’re best friend’s ex-wife`s neighbour done this for five months and brought home more than $5029 in their spare time on their mac. apply the guide on this link… jump15.comCHECK IT
OUT

http://www.facebook.com/glen.olah Glen Olah

Microsoft have not only seriously lost direction while attempting to go in all directions with the mess that is Windows 8 but they are also have too many confusing technologies while not supporting and evolving the technologies which would drive the continued benefits of the PC platform. They are alienating their loyal desktop users and driving away new users who are flocking to Android and iOS with their ease of use.

Microsoft have had many years and ample opportunity to make their operating system more intuitive and user friendly but instead have gone from bad to worse in this regard. I have bought Windows 7 laptops for both my mother and partner in the last 2 years and both still don’t understand how to use them. Windows 8 would be even more confusing for them. I regret not buying both tablets in the first place.

Recent figures indicate we are currently on the precipice of tablet sales overtaking notebook sales. The ability to play games and run high end software are really the only areas where tablets cant compete with traditional PC’s so Microsoft should be concentrating on the evolution of the PC as a gaming platform unless they want to create one less reason to purchase this convoluted platform.

And as traditional PC’s continue to decline in sales what is Microsoft’s answer to iOS and Android tablets; the mess that is Windows 8 but on a tablet! None of the ease of use that has made these competing tablets so successful. Yes they truly are lost in the woods. For the company that has been so instrumental in these early years of the computing revolution the release of Windows 8 will be looked back upon as the time when the tide turned and the king of the jungle became just another animal fighting for survival.

Neil Rieck

This is very curious indeed. Everyone knows the “X” in XBOX (Direct-X BOX) comes from Direct-X. It was one reason why games developed for the XBOX could be more easily moved to the PC than the PS3. Then some PS4 (due to be released in the Spring of 2013) information was leaked indicating that Sony was switching to graphics chips from AMD/ATI. Porting games between XBOX and PS4 would now be easier and everyone assumed that the PS4 would be more XBOX-like.

April Ochoa

If you think Marvin`s story is nice…, last munth my cousins boyfriend also made $9311 grafting a fourteen hour week from there apartment and they’re neighbor’s sister`s neighbour done this for seven months and easily made more than $9311 in there spare time at there labtop. applie the guide available on this page,, jump15.comCHECK IT OUT

Olga Peluso

until I saw the bank draft which was of $4469, I be certain that my brother woz like truley erning money in there spare time from their computer.. there sisters roommate started doing this for only nineteen months and recently cleared the loans on there mini mansion and got a great Mini Cooper. read more at, jump15.comCHECK IT OUT

NANCY

If you think Lillian`s story is incredible,, last pay cheque
my aunt’s boyfriend basically easily made $9800 working a twelve hour week at
home and they’re roomate’s mother-in-law`s neighbour has been doing this for 4
months and easily made more than $9800 in their spare time from a pc. use the
advice on this page, jump15.comCHECK IT OUT

Evan. if you think Jamie`s posting is impossible, last
thursday I got a new BMW 5-series after earning $4750 this last 4 weeks
and-just over, 10k this past munth. without a doubt its my favourite-job I’ve
ever had. I actually started 9-months ago and immediately started to make more
than $77… per-hr. I went to this web-site, jump15.comCHECK IT OUT

http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-Nunez/100000489002817 Rick Nunez

Adobe Flash Player still making money despite its anticipated death. A lot of money for Microsoft Windows despite its anticipated death. Go ahead Android, Linux, … don’t waste this opportunity. Some software companies are making a lot of bad decisions this days.

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